This document discusses the need for more human-centric customer relationship management (CRM) systems. It notes that traditional CRMs are designed more like databases that break down customer data but fail to foster real human relationships. However, recent market shifts toward valuing human skills and increased customer expectations are driving demand for CRMs that can adapt to users rather than forcing users to adapt to the system. The document advocates for CRM technologies that make users more human by intuitively providing insights to nurture customer relationships.

1. A MODERN
ALTERNATIVE
- to drive -
BETTER
BUSINESS
RELATIONSHIPS
CRM
for HUMANS

2. Long-term personal relationships formed and nurtured with customers are
your biggest competitive advantage in a service-based industry. Taking care
of those relationships is hard work, and it’s made even more challenging be-
cause today’s customers expect fast turnaround and informed responses.
If you’ve looked at a customer relationship management system, you’ve seen
how it’s traditionally designed for high-transaction businesses — breaking
down, capturing, and managing bits and bytes of data in order to run reports
to tell you how your business is doing.
But what has happened to the relationship component? Your relationships
aren’t made up of required fields or data points; they’re connections with
real people. Shouldn’t managing customer relationships be a fundamentally
human-to-human interaction, not a robotic one? And that’s where CRM for
Humans comes in. It’s a human-centric alternative to traditional CRMs.
The most important thing you can be in today’s business world is human.
CRMs need to provide insights and intelligence to make us more human in
our relationships with customers, employees, partners, and suppliers. That
information, and related processes, should work in the background to grow
revenue and improve satisfaction, not dilute the customer experience.
READ ON TO LEARN MORE ABOUT:
• The market challenges driving change for relationship-based businesses.
• Why sticking with the CRM status quo doesn’t foster the human component
or the relationships that drive business.
• How relationship management needs to be approached for business success.
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3. HUMANS ARE UNDERRATED:
MARKET SHIFT ONE
Although machines make our lives easier, more efficient, and far more con-
nected, they cannot replicate human empathy and collaboration. In an article
based on his book “Humans Are Underrated,” Fortune editor Geoff Colvin says
that even as technology advances into every aspect of our lives, the qualities
that make us human are more valuable than ever.
As Colvin argues, “It is precisely because technology is playing an increasingly
pervasive role in our lives that we must tap into our most fundamentally human
skills and traits to succeed in the workplace.”
“We are social beings, hardwired from our evolutionary past to equate personal
relationships with survival. We want to work with other people in solving prob-
lems, tell them stories and hear stories from them, [and] create new ideas with
them,” Colvin writes. “This desire to work alongside people — not machines —
to solve problems or build relationships has contributed to a more human side
of technology, one that allows us to better coexist and adapt together.”
The future’s most valuable skills are not analytical or left-brained skills that
computers or robots handle well. When Oxford Economics asked employers
what skills will be needed most in the next five to ten years, employers’ top
priorities included the most human skills: empathy, relationship building, col-
laborating, and problem solving.
Human
Skills
Valued
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4. THE MILLENNIAL MINDSET:
MARKET SHIFT TWO
More than one in three American workers today are Millennials, making that
generation the largest in the workforce, according to new analysis from the
Pew Research Center. Art Papas, Founder and CEO of Bullhorn, argues that
Millennials are more than an age group — Millennial has become a mindset.
“The Millennial mindset is a way of looking at the world and, regardless of
age, declaring, ‘there has to be a better way…easier, faster, more flexible and
efficient,” says Papas. As the first generation that grew up almost entirely
with modern technology, Millennials expect to be able to use technology in all
aspects of their lives, including at home, in their community, and on the job.
The Millennial mindset is driving a continuous improvement in technology for
every user. In his Fortune article “How Tech-Savvy Millennials Humanize Your
Workplace,” Papas describes how “technologies borne of the Millennial mind-
set give us flexibility, agility, mobility, and a personal touch. These qualities
improve life for all of us, regardless of our age or generation.”
New
Technology
Mindset
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5. THE AGE OF THE CUSTOMER:
MARKET SHIFT THREE
This year, Forrester defined a new era: The Age of the Customer. Thanks to tech-
nology, today’s customers know more about you and your company than any
previous generation. It takes just a few quick Google searches to learn about your
products and services, your pricing, and your reputation. Those same few clicks
will locate the exact same information about your competition.
“Today, your company might have a lot of information, but your customers control
it. Your customers now not only have opinions, but also a voice,” says Danielle du
Toit, SVP of Global Services at Bullhorn.
This Age of the Customer brings heightened expectations. Customers want quick
responses to questions or problems and up-to-the-minute knowledge about their
preferences and relationship history. And thanks to this always-on mentality, that
information needs to be accessible anywhere and at any time, by employees,
partners, and suppliers.
According to Cindy Elliott, Vice President of Product and Industry Marketing at
Bullhorn, “There is a continuous forward push. As general consumers interact
with technology in their everyday lives, those same technology experiences will
be expected in enterprise relationships too.”
.
Increased
Customer
Expectations
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6. HUMAN-CENTERED
TECHNOLOGIES
These three market shifts — the increasing importance of human qualities in a
technology-dominated world, the Millennial mindset, and the Age of the Cus-
tomer — are bringing about what Papas calls human-centered technologies.
“Unlike the technology that was born in the 1990s and the earliest days of the
21st century, we are now seeing the emergence of technology that adapts to
humans, rather than forcing humans to adapt to it. Think smart thermostats
that allow you to save energy by monitoring your house’s heating and cool-
ing from your phone, online music platforms that know which song you want
to hear based on prior listening, client relationship management systems that
know what your clients want before they do.”
Papas goes on to explain that, “at its best, technology should make us more
human by channeling the incredible intellectual power we naturally and intui-
tively possess, and allowing us to live and work more efficiently, collaboratively,
and creatively.”
“Unlike the technology
that was born in the
1990s and earliest days
of the 21st century, we
are now seeing the
emergence of technology
that adapts to humans…”
- Art Papas
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7. THE STATE OF CRM TODAY
To understand what these market shifts mean for managing customer relation-
ships, let’s review the history of CRMs.
The first systems were designed purely as contact management databases —
they were essentially electronic Rolodexes. They weren’t even officially called
CRMs. Their primary purpose was storing and organizing basic customer con-
tact information, a core tenet still present in systems today.
As time passed, contact management systems continued to evolve and CRM
— “R” for that important word, relationship — became the proper name. Large
vendors entered the market and began including more features, applications,
and automation. But the focus remained on requiring users to enter data in
a set path and in static fields (many of which were required). Even though
“relationship” made it into the technology’s name, there wasn’t a focus on how
users could utilize the information to build relationships. And while the launch
of cloud-based CRM systems brought big changes in accessibility and usabil-
ity, the robotic component of data entry and reporting didn’t change.
But that’s not how people work today.
We’re now entering a new era of CRMs that aren’t transaction-focused. Ser-
vice-based businesses still depending on CRMs that require their relationship
managers to act like robots and enter fields of data might survive, but they will
most likely struggle to grow and create long-term profitable relationships. Busi-
ness success today is tied to managing and understanding the best customer
relationships, which requires time and hard work by humans, not a database.
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8. WHY ROBOTIC CRMS
ARE UNDERUTILIZED
CRMs have become big business. According to Gartner, in 2014, the worldwide
CRM market was $23.2 billion, up 13.3 percent over 2013.
Bullhorn customer research shows that, in regards to their CRM usage:
• More than 80 percent of users said “My CRM keeps me organized.”
• 59 percent said “saves me time.”
• 54 percent said “gives me insights.”
And yet “63 percent of CRM initiatives fail” — meaning they’re underutilized.
Why? CRMs have been built for robots, not humans.
• Many CRM systems are just glorified databases, engineered with only
reporting in mind.
• With no easy way to capture unstructured data, legacy CRM systems
marginalize key information that’s vital to maintaining and growing
relationships.
• If your process doesn’t fit a pre-programmed (and frankly, outdated)
data model, you’re forced to change to fit a CRM’s discrete data fields.
• According to direct Bullhorn customer research, manual data entry
is the most common frustration for 34 percent of CRM users.
Reducing complex relationships to simple data records forces employees to
act like data robots, and that process doesn’t capture the essence of informa-
tion needed to build relationships with real people. Human relationships are
built through unstructured data points like emails, phone calls, and texts. Most
robotic systems were designed without the ability to programmatically handle
unstructured data.
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9. In today’s fast-paced business environment, who has time to remember to go
back and enter information? “If you were to ask any salesperson what he or
she would do with one extra hour each day, would that time be spent provid-
ing value to customers or entering CRM data? Hands down, interacting with
customers would always win,” Bullhorn’s Elliott says.
Sadly, Bullhorn’s direct customer research found that 59 percent of CRM users
combat these issues by using an Excel spreadsheet to supplement their CRM.
THE HIDDEN COST
OF STICKING WITH THE STATUS QUO
Customers demand that inter-
actions be more personal.
Companies face pressure
to grow and innovate.
Employees want to be more
human in their relationships.
Robotic data fields alone don’t
deliver quick responses and
superior customer service.
Traditional CRM systems
don’t give insights into
profitable relationships or
general account sentiment.
Manually entering information
turns salespeople and customer
service into data robots.
Relationships waver and crack,
and fed up customers eventu-
ally leave.
New opportunities stagnate
or, worse, decline.
Employees quickly burn out
or quit.
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10. CRM FOR HUMANS IS MOBILE-FIRST
The more human-friendly your CRM is, the more people will actually use it.
Unlike CRMs built around transactional sales models, CRM for Humans is
built through a relationship lens. Instead of just showing all of the contacts
at a company, CRM for Humans translates captured information into intuitive
insights organized into simple, straightforward visuals, showing things like
your top engaged contacts and the best time to connect.
.
CRM FOR HUMANS
Build Better Relationships
Radical
Ease of Use
Relationship
Insight
Proactive
Intelligence
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11. CRM FOR HUMANS
MANAGES RELATIONSHIPS BETTER
For relationship-driven organizations, what are the guiding principles needed
today to make us more human in our relationships with customers, employees,
partners, and suppliers?
1. Radical Ease of Use Improves Sales Productivity
CRM for Humans is radically easy to use and built for today’s high-volume,
multitasking business environments, keeping your employees focused on
customer interactions and not on database management. Solutions built on
a single infrastructure (rather than a combination of platforms pieced to-
gether ad hoc) fluidly manage the entire customer lifecycle.
CRM for Humans is built for mobile first. Users can be productive anywhere
and at any time by working seamlessly across smartphones, tablets, and
desktops.
CRM for Humans is also completely automated to capture customer interac-
tions. Instead of requiring you to tell your CRM what you’ve done already,
CRM for Humans improves staff efficiency by scanning and recording inter-
actions for you. No more brow-beating users to enter data. While they’re off
focusing on being human with customers, the CRM does the work for them.
2. Relationship Insight Improves Customer Satisfaction
Unlike CRMs built around transactional sales models, CRM for Humans is
built through a relationship lens. Instead of just showing all of the contacts
at a company, CRM for Humans translates captured information into intui-
tive insights organized into simple, straightforward visuals.
More importantly, CRM for Humans captures customer sentiment to
flag issues that need immediate attention before they escalate. Robotic,
data-driven systems only record an issue after it’s happened. Rather than
using historical data to analyze the present, CRM for Humans provides
insight into what’s happening right now and gives you a true picture of
your real-time customer satisfaction.
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12. 3. Proactive Intelligence Helps Grow Revenue
What do your employees need most? Recaps of emails sent or calls made?
Or maybe they need intelligence about what to do next, what call to make,
and what relationship requires their direct efforts?
Rather than just serving as a repository for data that lives in the past, CRM
for Humans is predictive and enlightening, telling you what to do next. As
customer interactions unfold in real-time, CRM for Humans reprioritizes and
proactively anticipates new opportunities to help you close the next deal
more quickly and easily.
DON’T LET THE ROBOTS
RUN YOUR BUSINESS
Your business relationships are your most critical business assets. Don’t let
them fall victim to the robots. To retain customers and win high-value new
business in today’s competitive marketplace, a new approach to managing
customer relationships is needed: a CRM for Humans.
Contact us or learn more by visiting www.bullhorn.com/humans
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13. ABOUT BULLHORN
Bullhorn provides cloud-based, human-friendly CRM solutions for companies
in service-based industries. Bullhorn CRM is built for the way businesses work
now. Its data capture and customer insight technology puts the most up-to-
date and powerful information at users’ fingertips to give them everything they
need to win customers and keep them happy. Today, Bullhorn serves more
than 10,000 clients and 350,000 users, and its software solutions are used by
some of the world’s most prominent services enterprises to help increase sales,
improve service delivery, and streamline operations. Headquartered in Boston,
the company has offices in St. Louis, London, and Sydney, with 500 employees
globally. The company is founder-led and backed by Vista Equity Partners.
33-41 Farnsworth Street, 5th Floor,
Boston, MA 02210
www.bullhorn.com
(617) 478-9100
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